Monday, April 03, 2006

New Zealand domestic flight crazy rules

Now I live in America so I'm used to strange rules at the airport.

When going through security now best thing is to1. take off all jackets, coats, vests, shirts with pockets, tops with ties, hell anything thats not seethru2. take off your shoes, boots, sandals, clogs, runners, slippers3. take everything out of your bag, computer, ipod, video camera, dvd player, walkman (remember those?)4. take off your belt and underwire bra... I wont tell you how many times I've tripped their alarms with my super mega underwired can it keep them up and out bra...5. to be safe take out all batteries of electronic equipment (they just had us do this at SFO)6. To be extra safe just strip naked, probably easier and carry on of a pencil that needs sharpened.

Even with all of that when we flew to New Zealand Jan had an extra step and had to go through a machine that looked like a seethrough telephone booth or tardis (joys of Dr Who being back will be followed up later) and it poofed at him. I asked to go through - just because it looked geeky kind of cool. They said no.... No sense of fun these people

Anyway as you can see from above - well used to the joys of strange rules... Well New Zealand domestic air beats them all.

We got into Auckland at 5am - firstly let me say their staff are wonderful and friendly at airport - they have free tea (good tea - not the stuff they pretend is tea here - but thats a whole other post on tea...) and they were super nice as they sent our hiking boots to a lab to be cleaned and tested to make sure we hadnt brought anything in, since I hadnt hiked in mine but wear them from a van to a pub trying to look fit no danger but better safe then sorry.

Anyway - we walk over to domestic terminal with our bags to get a flight to south Island to being our honeymoon and adventure. Lady tells us that hand luggage can only be 7Kilos on the plane - now for Americans and some other countries who decided that they would stay with old system about 14 pounds. Not a lot. They even weight it at gate when you are going through. Problem was , nothing and I mean nothing else could fit into my checked luggage - miracle it was closed as was. My hand luggage weighed 19 kgs - so major problem...

So there we are - and I suspect my bag weights about 5 kgs (kilos) and lady says to me - no worries (which is their phrase for everything - same as Irish saying its grand when your leg is hanging off...) What we will do miss is have you carry everything... So get this - you can only bring on 7kgs but you can put everything in your pockets and even carry stuff and look like the mitchlen man or johnny fortycoats and weigh now 300 pounds or 25 stone... I had a makeup bag in my pocket to give you an idea, 3 books, a pillow, blankets in my hand - I looked like I was planning on camping in the airport - I waddled onto plane and dumped it all in overhead. My handluggage - the now empty bag holding i think a pen in it was 6 half pounds. Now theres a silly rule...

1 Comments:

Your post made me laugh out loud! To think you wasted precious time packing your carryon only to have to unpack it into your pockets and socks. Although, it does bring to light another use for cleavage produced by the underwire bra...